ADOLF HITLER

(1889 - 1945) Fuhrer of Germany and Nazi Party leader, Hitler's bloody rise to power, his military seizure of most of Europe and North Africa and his genocidal racial policies culminated in suicide in his Berlin bunker as Russian troops approached. Scarce good content T.L.S. "your Adolf Hitler" on his personal correspondence card, 1p. 12 mo., [n.p., n. d. but likely Berlin, ca. 1944] to "Party Member Dr. Scheel". In part: "...With your congratulations on my birthday but all with the [gift of the] portfolio of valuable drawings by Franz Alt, you have given me a special pleasure. I express my heartfelt thanks..." Fine condition. Hitler's correspondent was almost certainly Gustav Adolf Scheel (1907-1979), German physician and Nazi politician. As an SS member and Sicherheitsdienst employee, he served as leader of both the National Socialist German Students' League and the German Student Union, as an Einsatzgruppen commander in occupied Alsace, and as a Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter in Salzburg. As Einsatzgruppen commander, he organized the deportation of Karlsruhe's Jews to the extermination camps in the east.